Favorite Children’s Stories
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[originally posted at drewdowns.wordpress.com]
When Rose was pregnant with our daughter, we read to her. We picked out a bunch of children’s books and we read to her in utero. We felt pretty silly doing it, but we hoped that it would help her. She would get used to our voices, the sound of our reading to her, and the patterns of stories.
After she was born, we read to her all the time with two or three books every single night, without exception. The most profound moment of my parenting life was reading stories to this daughter I wasn’t sure would live to see her one week birthday.
We all love stories.
We love the characters and the patterns and the language. We love the creative ways we can see the world. But as adults, most of us take this for granted. Our tomes take hours or days or weeks (or in some cases months or years) of steady reading. We get pulled into riveting plots and fantastic tales full of fantasy and intrigue: from thrillers to sci-fi, mysteries to classic literature: we leave our world behind and enter another. And some particularly great books make us feel like kids again.
What we forget about, however, is that each of these stories is about something. They teach us about our world and how we might navigate it. They teach us morals and ethics about our behavior and the nature of our existence.
I want to hear about your favorite children’s stories. The stories that effected your childhood. The stories that you adore. The stories that you read to your kids or wish other people read to theirs.
Tell me your favorite children’s stories. But you have to tell me why. ”I like it” isn’t good enough. Nor is “I just like Dr. Seuss”. Explain what it is that makes this story meaningful. And keep them coming. Over the next few days, I’ll be covering some of my favorites and I want this to be a group affair. Comment here and on Facebook, and I’ll catalog many of the responses. You can also email a longer response and I’ll include it in a future post!
So dig out those children’s books and feel those stories again!
Drew Downs
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